27 June 2012 10:20 AM

Kim Kardashian a better role model than the Duchess of Cambridge? You have to be kidding1

It beggars belief that a serious broadsheet commentator could argue that Kim Kardashian is a better role model for schoolgirls than the Duchess of Cambridge.

But this is just what Camilla Long did in last Sunday’s Times.

Kim Kardashian is very beautiful. She is the highest earning reality star in the world – famed for her ample rear, for starring in an explicit sex tape with her boyfriend as well as for her TV show, ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians. She is the girl, or rather what she stands for, that Dr Helen Wright, the headmistress of St Mary’s Calne Girls Boarding School, lambasted last week.

‘Almost everything that is wrong with Western society today can be summed up in that one symbolic photo of Miss Kim Kardashian on the front of Zoo magazine’, she fumed. Many agreed with her.

Camilla Long, the Sunday Times columnist, did not.

In an extraordinary feminist tirade, she argued that to be a public wife like Samantha Cameron or the Duchess of Cambridge is as much to prostitute yourself as to lie spread-eagled across a magazine centre fold for money. Kate’s is a life, went her argument, ‘of hems and tights where a woman is judged by her muffins, not by her brains – a cult as insidious as Nuts’ (a magazine where girls are invited to upload sexy photos of themselves).

She did not stop there. ‘Sure’, the girls of St Mary’s, Calne, ‘can be taught to impersonate the Duchess of Cambridge for fees of £30,000 a year, but is not hard-working Kim a better role model?’

Setting aside Long’s ignorant calumnies (regarding both the school and the Duchess of Cambridge’s lifestyle and work schedule) does she really believe that posing in knickers on the front of a sex magazine is a desirable career aspiration? Is it really better than marrying a man who needs a woman to be a work partner to him as well as to be his wife and mother of their children? Or in her world view is stripping for money OK when it brings in millions?

It was hard to tell.

Long thinks that nobody takes Kardashian and her fellow celebrities seriously. She thinks few women relate to them; or if they do they laugh at them. Even the most impressionable teenagers, she asserted, would think a life of massive boobs and hair extensions is absurd.

Unfortunately this is just not so. If the young didn’t worship celebrities they would not be in our faces all day. This multi billion pound business would not exist if it relied only on a few journalists laughing at it. Indeed Ms Long would not be dedicating nearly two broadsheet pages to the subject.

The bottom line is money and sex.

That is where Dr Wright is so right and Ms Long so wrong. Girls today are impressed and obsessed. They think this is what they have to do to attract boys. They see what footballers’ wives have done. Sex is part of the commercial transaction.

Girls give and boys can demand it.

This is the nadir into which feminism and early sexualisation (that Long strangely does not seem to recognise) has perversely brought us.

It is the price of gender parity. Contemporary commercial exploitation of sex is based on a fundamental change (for the worse) in the terms and rules of sexual engagement. It is not about desperation. It is about aspiration.

With femininity all but gone and men psychologically, if not economically, emasculated, relationships are reduced to a currency of sex and barely disguised bargaining over it.

What should be the most private part of our social existence is constantly made stridently public.

Women’s power once lay in their restraint. Now young women believe it lies in excess. Of course it does not. It is a new and willing form of prostitution. It is as disastrous for girls’ self esteem as it is for men’s respect of them.

It is ironic that feminism instead of ending female exploitation has opened up new dimensions.

Dr Wright is right to be worried.

For young people are obsessed by celebrity figures. And it is a vicious circle: the lower the self esteem, the greater the obsession. Jealousy plays a part too. Schadenfreude is just around the corner. The only thing more compelling than an icon’s beauty, coolness and success is his downfall and denigration. This is the basis of the public’s love-hate relationship with the stars. Sad it may be – but it is true.

The lesson that self worth comes only from your own positive actions, not from envying others, is one that many of today’s parents have failed to communicate.

This is the psychological failing that the magazines, the gossip columns and the reality shows all trade on.

They also trade on the pitiful need for affirmation and recognition of the celebrities themselves, only look at Britney Spears.

Unlike the UK’s ultimate glamour model, Katie Price, Kim Kardashian comes from an affluent family. She did not have to make something from nothing. But she has prostituted herself all the same – and apparently with her mother’s collusion. She lost her virginity at 14, she told Oprah (and the whole world), after consultation with her mother, who suggested she went on the pill. In another age that would be called child abuse.

Camilla Long regards her as vacuous and silly. Then in the same breath she says that this woman is a better role model than the Duchess of Cambridge. Kardashian is a girl who has been stupid enough to have exposed herself to every journalist under the sun, allowing them to say what her sex life is or isn’t. Does Camilla Long even realise what she said I wonder?

Kim Kardashian may be ‘asking for it’ but that does not excuse Long’s blasé discussion of her sex life any more than a short skirt excuses rape. Would she be happy, I wonder, for someone else to write about her own child in those terms – if that child had decided to follow the Kim Kardashian role model?

I would have Dr Wright’s moral judgment any day than Long’s collusion with this poor girl’s exploitation.

Kim Khardashian’s ‘boundary-less’ living and constant sex chat is bad because it is sad and because it is abusive, of her as well as of her followers. Beautiful and rich she may be but her outlook is dire. God knows what sort of mother she will make.

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